Search setting suggestion

I love the app and use it more than any other app. One suggestion. When I search for a podcast I often find podcasts that are old and inactive. It would be awesome to search for podcasts that have at least released a podcast in the last 30 days.

It would be great if the date of the most recent episode was shown in the search results, and that the search results could be sorted by most recent episode date.

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@SAFAmerican Just to be sure: which kinda search are talking about here? :face_with_monocle:

The search when you add a new podcast, or the search anywhere else in the app (which also returns podcasts that you’re already subscribed to)?

For a new podcast. Thank you!

Allright. For the new episode search, AntennaPod mostly makes use of the Podcast Index. Its search API does have return the lastUpdateTime:

The channel-level pubDate for the feed, if it’s sane. If not, this is a heuristic value, arrived at by analyzing other parts of the feed, like item-level pubDates.

This information could be taken and displayed in the search results. It’s not exactly the ‘last episode date’ but I reckon this would still be helpful. We can also ask if Podcast Index can start providing the ‘last episode date’ always, but that would take a bit of time before it’s implemented and I’m not sure it’s much more helpful than the data that’s already available. @SAFAmerican, what do you think?

Concernig the UI, I imagine a new line below the authors (if the information is available - because this might not be the case for Fyyd and iTunes which are also included in the results). WDYT @ByteHamster? Good enough case to create a ticket in GitHub?

The API also has the dead value:

At some point, we give up trying to process a feed and mark it as dead. This is usually after 1000 errors without a successful pull/parse cycle. Once the feed is marked dead, we only check it once per month.

Given the high threshold, we might filter out ‘dead’ podcasts by default: these podcasts don’t have a working feed for a long time. (I don’t know exactly how long though - we can ask this to the Podcast Index team.)

If really needed (but I don’t think), we could make an option to deactivate this filter in the search settings (which don’t exist now, but I think would be quite welcome in the future for other things).

Well, it sounds like it might be more trouble than it’s worth. Thanks for the information though. Nice to get a peek behind the curtain.

Sometimes something that sounds simple really isn’t all that simple. You guys are just dealing with the data available and it isn’t always that good.

I don’t think I would want to make any changes knowing what I know now. Thanks anyway.

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I created a request with the Podcast Index anyway: Return `lastEpisodeTime` on `/search/byterm` (and other search) endpoint(s) · Issue #3 · Podcastindex-org/api · GitHub

As per Various updates by stevencrader · Pull Request #93 · Podcastindex-org/docs-api · GitHub, this info is now exposed. Will try to remember creating a GitHub issue for this enhancement.

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I just created a feature request on GitHub (where app happens) for displaying the ‘latest episode’ date: Display 'Latest episode' date in search results · Issue #6299 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub

This could in the end be included also in advanced search, but that’s something for a bit longer term.

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